John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto is author of “Dumbing Us Down” and “Underground History of American Education.”
The Interview:
JGatto_12/18/07.mp3
His Website:
www.johntaylorgatto.com
John Taylor Gatto- 12/18/07
Gatto describes the history of “the psychopathic school.” Gatto believes we are full human beings at age 13 and all of us are capable of excelling. For example, First Admiral David was only 12 years old when he commanded and American fleet.
But our modern, elite system is extremely racist and artificially extends childhood in order to make the masses of people into better workers (drones) and more reliable consumers. In Underground History of American Education, Gatto shows that modern educational policy decisions have an ancient genesis. The template is Plato’s Republic. Plato divided people into metals, based on their different potentials: gold, silver, bronze, and lead. He believed most people are analogous to lead, i.e., “human sludge.” In 1555, attorney John Calvin, advanced a Christian theology without sin and redemption. The redeemed are picked before they are board. All the rest, like Plato’s lead people, are already damned. This theology fit the preferred elite worldview and helped them work out a social and economic order that allowed the elite to live much better than the rest of us. Calvin thus, helped invent a mass schooling system in which the masses are filled with incomplete truths. This supported a system of elite privilege.
Benedict Spinoza, a liberal philosopher, believed in liberty and freedom, but only for the upper 5% of humans. The other 95% have to be controlled and jailed. His writings helped establish a universal system based on nonsense and half truths. The idea was to sell school as a substitute for organized religion (itself, the most irrational institution), creating a “secular, civil religion.”
In 1871, Charles Darwin’s second book, Descent of Man, concluded that only a small fraction of the population is evolving; the rest are evolutionary dead ends- I.e., most people can’t be improved. German philospher/educator Wilhem Vunt, became the main inspiration for many American educational luminaries- including John Dewey and G. Stanley Hall. A deluge of German Ph.D.’s became Presidents of American Universities and heads of departments. This allowed for the institution of the idea that education is nonsense and that people are machines. Martin Luther, founder of the Lutheran Church, loathed ordinary people, saying we should skin them alive and hang them upside down. The Federalist Papers show that power corrupts. Jefferson rejected the “civil religion” school as a waste of people’s time.
(33rd degree Mason) Ben Franklin financed the American Revolution by getting the French to pay for it. Robber barons such as Andrew Carnegie (a passionate social Darwinist) and J.D. Rockefeller set up their foundations to chain the college curriculum to that of elementary, jr. high and high schools, using the German system of education as template. The Carnegie Foundation set up a college pension fund. In order to buy in, colleges had to agree to demand that high schools specialize in certain subject areas. Overnight, all high schools in America adopted this model. See Carol Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time.